Victorine

Summary

In her memoir, Breakup, Catherine Texier tells how her husband left her for another woman. In Victorine, Texier takes the memory of Victorine, her maternal great-grandmother, and transforms it, so that Victorine, in the throes of a grand passion, leaves her husband and children for another man. Naturally, Victorine's motives are soulful, and yet she has committed a mother's ultimate sin. Her flight with her lover to turn-of-the-century Indochina leads to days of great beauty and nights of sensuous languor, along the banks of the Mekong River. At the same time, she has much time to muse about the struggle between duty and independence, tradition and freedom, longing and regret. All of these thoughts are now condensed into a single day: a day when she has returned.

Reviews

This is another book that gets a half of a star only as a placeholder -- shouldn't even get that much in my opinion. This book sounded great from its description (apparently inspired by the author's great-grandmother) and had so much potential as a work of historical fiction. Instead it was 300 pages of Victorine dithering between staying with her husband or staying with her lover. I honestly didn't like her enough as a character to care what she decided in the end.

My rating is an average. I would give the first 9/10 of the book 4 stars and the last 1/10 zero stars.Victorine, married with two children, leaves an unhappy marriage and escapes to Indochina with her childhood sweetheart. They build a life there in the hot, humid weather, exotic flowers and swirls of opium smoke. Then, after 10 years, she goes back to France, back to her husband. She starts out planning to finally end things with him - ask for a divorce, explain things to her children - but she stays, has another child, lives out her life. The frustrating thing about the book is that 95% of the story deals with her decision to leave and her life in Indochina; only a small fraction at the very end deals with her return. There is no mention of how she was received by her old friends and neighbors, how she explained her absence, how she made peace - if she made peace - with her children. She and her husband had another child, but they also separated: there is virtually no explanation for that and there are no details, no explanations. She continued to see her childhood sweetheart after her marriage broke up - only a few brief paragraphs explain all of this. Although she saw him every summer from the time she and her husband separated until he died at age 62 (only 3 years before the story takes place), there is no explanation of how this started, why it continued, why they never married. If you like a story with closure and all the loose ends wrapped up, avoid this book.